"Sanity is a madness put to good use." – George Santayana

A Work in Progress: Beige is Bland.

What do you think?! After being inspired by some older photos of some of the decor inside the Beaux Arts Mansion in St.Louis that boasts a lot of teal and turquoise decor. I loved it! I have always been taught that I should go with neutrals and that dark bold colors make a room feel small. I’ve decided that I cannot accept these rules. I love bright bold colors, but I do really like some soft neutrals too. I love neutral greens, sages. I love bark-colored browns and how appropriate the living room paint, via the previous owners, is actually called bark. It works very well for the room.

I have two green bathrooms. One, via the previous owners, a green grape color that we didn’t realize would work for the room until we put up the shower curtains, the rugs and the sink accessories — and then we realized it matched one of the accent colors in the shower curtain. So we kept it.

The final white wall in the house was the upstairs hallway. I told Robert that one thing I simply could not tolerate was a white wall in the house. A while wall is a blank canvas for me that cannot be left alone. At the moment I am tolerating the bedroom walls that are this terrible shade of peachy taupe – that makes me feel like I’m in a doctors or a dentists office or something… Yuck! …but, it’s on the list. We decided to do something bold for the upstairs hallway since we are working on planning out installing recessed lighting in that hallway and replacing the hanging stairwell light with something more contemporary. Though the house was built in 1935, that does not mean that the house cannot be modernized. Here it is, ‘Tuscon Teal’. Robert and I both love it! Now to start working in on my husband to start working on a color palette for the bedroom. The bedspread is powder blue and a milk chocolate brown squares – but I feel like I don’t want another blue and brown combination. I want something different. But, that means I’d have to change the bedding. I’m almost willing to do it.

There are so many projects I want to get moving on in this house but the money is tied up in major repairs right now. There are 5-7 windows being replaced in the next month and that doesn’t leave a whole lot of cash left over for major things that need to be done, which technically is really just the windows, that are (gulp) original and none of them are in the greatest of shape so we are going to start replacing the windows a handful at a time as the budget allows, but most of it will have to be stretched out over the next year or so. Damn those tax credits for putting a fire under my ass!!

I’ll post more pictures of progress as we get through them. Recently, we made a pact to clean up the basement and we did a great job, we got rid of a LOT of crap with very little fuss, bought some tubs instead of lots of shabby cardboard boxes, and we labeled them all so we know whats in all of them, but there is still some cleaning out of the cobwebs and scrubby cleaning to be done. 🙂